I tend to agree with those who say that the ideal city would have both right-of-way transit lines and separated bike lanes on every major street. But I also recognize that this is not politically viable. Too many suburban voters are against it. Urbanites have enough clout to get bike lanes or transit, but not necessarily both.
For this reason, I think it would be best to advocate for transit only, leaving the issue of bike lanes to the side until the transit fight is won. Bike lanes are great too of course, but not nearly as useful as transit can be.
However, I also recognize that even this is not politically viable. There are too many bike enthusiasts who will not delay their push for better bike lanes. For these bike enthusiasts and transit advocates to present a unified front in their negotiations with suburbanites, they must first reach a compromise among themselves.
The compromise could be this: a hybrid transit/bike lane, which changes functions depending on the weather.
It would work something like as follows. On days when the weather is expected to stay within a range of, say, 0-30 degrees celcius, and not rain too much, cyclists will get to have a separated bike lane that is so wide that it will actually have two bike lanes within it: a passing lane and a slower lane. On these days, Toronto would become ideally the most bike-friendly city in North America.
However on days when the weather is expected to be too cold, hot, or rainy, bicylists will not be allowed to bike on major roads at all. Instead, the bike lanes would be used as a right-of-way bus lane.
Of course, there would be winners and losers in this plan, as in any political solution. The losers would be ultraenthusiastic cyclists, the people who love to brag about how they bike to work even in January.
The winners would be everybody else.
Future Economics 